The Flight Attendant

by Chris Bohjalian
Vintage, 2018, 345 pages

Reviewed by Ted Streuli
Sept. 4, 2022

Take the dead-hooker-in-a-hotel-room problem and twist it a bit.

Cassie Bowden, a nearly 40-year-old tenured flight attendant, wakes up in a passenger’s hotel room entwined in crimson-stained sheets thanks to the deep slit across his throat.

They had a good time last night, she’s pretty sure. What she remembers of it, anyway. Did she kill him?

She doesn’t think so, but there are too many holes in her memory to be certain.

And there we have it. A tried-and-true mystery novel scenario that never quite wears out: an unexplainable murder that makes our amnesiac heroine the leading suspect.

The victim, Alex Sokoloff, is a hedge fund manager with ties to Russian oligarchs and an important meeting in Dubai. Cassie had the first-class cabin on the flight from New York, and as she’s inclined to do, flirted her way to a date after arrival.

She knew that most men desired her because she was attractive and she was smart, but also because she was a drunk and she was easy. This one? She hoped for his sake he wasn’t as different as he seemed, because she always disappointed those men quickly or broke their hearts over time.

She’s an unreliable narrator, a self-aware, promiscuous, binge-drinker prone to blackouts. She knows she shouldn’t; she knows she will anyway. She walks a line — heel to toe? — with self-loathing on one side and self-acceptance on the other. At times that makes her a sympathetic character, but it’s easy to become judgmental in parts, so we’re left walking our own lines alongside her.

Recognizing that Dubai might not be the best place to get arrested, Cassie slips out of the hotel and lies about her interactions with Alex.

But as happens with alcohol-induced blackouts, bits of memory surface: There was a woman, one of Alex’s associates, she brought vodka to the room, she left, everyone was still alive. Then what?

Sex.

Blackness. Waking up next to a dead man.

Dubai police want to talk to Cassie — slipping out of the hotel didn’t avoid the security cameras and Alex’s credit card trail was easily followed — but she’s back in New York and not signing on for flights to Dubai anytime soon. The author of 20 novels, Chris Bohjalian makes us wonder with Cassie whether she killed Alex, and if not, who did? Why?

The answer is revealed as Bohjalian switches the point of view to Elena, the vodka-wielding associate who populates snippets of Cassie’s memory. Elena is a second-generation assassin whose own life is at risk because she failed to kill Cassie when she re-entered the room later that night to dispose of Alex.

She’s expected to tie up that loose end, adding tension as Cassie is pursued by the police, the assassin and her conscience.

Fleeing is a significant theme in “The Flight Attendant.” The heroine has made a career out of flight, after all, perpetually taking off for somewhere else. Cassie is fleeing her past, a mother who died when Cassie was young, an alcoholic father whose drinking led to several deaths, including his own and Cassie’s younger sister’s. She’s fleeing with gin. She fleeing with sex.

In her battle to avoid becoming her father, she still hears his advice: “You bury the dead and move on.”

The trouble is that moving on, no matter how many ways Cassie tries, isn’t easy.

Bohjalian shows us Cassie’s constant turmoil when it surfaces mid-flight. A passenger, Missy, consoles her:

“Do you know people cry on airplanes more than anywhere else?”

“I didn’t know it was a fact,” she answered, “but I might have suspected as much from my years up here.”

“Yeah, you’d probably know better than me. But on a plane, you’re often alone. Or you’re stressed. Or you’ve just had some meaningful experience. Movies and books will really get to you at thirty-five thousand feet.”

The truthfulness of that observation is clear to anyone who has had to say goodbye at the gate.

We want Cassie’s plane to land, for her to be greeted by ecstatic family members who wrap her in hugs and encouragement. But as we know from flight attendants’ telling us for decades, we have to put on our own oxygen masks first; Cassie has to save herself. The chance that she might gives us hope for her redemption and our own, clearest when Bohjalian writes:

Remember that person you wanted to be? There’s still time.